Last
week, an article went up on our sister site,
href="http://www.eqhammer.com/">EQHammer.com,
entitled “
href="http://www.eqhammer.com/column/underfoot-silence-isnt-golden">Silence
Isn’t
Golden” and talked
about all the reasons players think developer
communication is a joke. Some complaints pointed out were that X
Company doesn’t
communicate enough. Players are tired of feeling like they’re
being kept at
arm’s length. They don’t understand why their
important questions are not being
answered and have determined that this “needs to stop
immediately”.

As
a former Community Coordinator for BioWare and
ArenaNet, I'm here to give you some bad news. It’s not going
to happen. I agree
that in a perfect world, it would be awesome if developers could take
time
every day and respond to player posts, read the forums, and share the
long-term
goals of the game they’re working on. The sad reality though
is that while communication
between developers and players can change and improve, until there's a
shift in
human behavior on the internet, it will never happen.

There
are a number of reasons for this, but let’s start
off with just a few. For starters, just because someone is a great
programmer
or designer does not mean they’re good at communicating with
fans. For example,
I worked with one developer that was a mathematical genius and thought
he was
funny, but sent a set of forums into a complete meltdown when he
started
trolling the players. He wasn’t trying to, he just failed to
understand how
things come across differently in the written word so that’s
the way his posts
came across. He was also far too opinionated to be a voice of reason in
the
middle of an angry mob.

Companies
hire community professionals for a reason, not
the least of which is our ability to deal with players on a daily basis
without
sending them into an uproar. At least that’s true for most
days. Like it or
not, the amount of vitriol any community team deals with on a daily
basis would
send most people into a black pit of depression they would never emerge
from.
Developers are skilled in their professions, but
style="">many
do not handle hatred and vicious comments well – to the point
that I’ve seen some leave for days because they were so hurt
by the words of
their “fans”.

And
yes, I put the fans above in quotation marks. I can’t
count the amount of times players have used the forums or private
message
systems to write some of the most horrific things about developers and
their
families that you can imagine. Most of these comments make the whole
Penny
Arcade Dickwolves fiasco sound like a story you’d read to
little children to
help them go to sleep at night. Most developers are not wired to handle
that
kind of hatred. And yes, before you ask, of course the community team
does
everything they can to keep the forums clean and amicable.

So
far, this sounds like a rant fest, eh? The good news
is that the majority of any game’s players never set foot on
the forums and
those that do are actually pretty good people. The problem comes in the
form of
perspective though. Keep in mind that with some of these games, like
SWTOR, we
were dealing with over a million forum users. Literally - over 1
million. Hundreds
of thousands of posts were made every single day at one point. Even if
only 1%
of those posts are hate-filled diatribes (and the percentage will
always be
higher than that, no matter what game you’re talking about),
that means that
out of 200,000 posts, that’s still 2,000 posts that need to
be cleaned up or
removed. In the scheme of things, that doesn’t sound like
much, but it doesn’t
take too many rotten apples to spoil the bunch.

Forgetting
the angry posters for a while, let’s talk
about the developers themselves. I can tell you from personal
experience that a
large number of them would love to answer tons of questions on the
forums. For
the sake of argument, let’s assume they even had the time to
do so (which they
really don’t). Let’s even assume that
we’re not talking about them going
through the forums themselves, but are just responding to the forum
posts
forwarded to them each day by the members of the community team. 99% of
all
questions have to do with one of two things – something that
isn’t working or
something players want to see in the game.

In
the case of something that isn’t working, I
style="">guarantee
that if there’s already a
thread about it, the development team is aware of it. There are systems
in
place that continually monitor and analyze player behavior. As a
result, it
doesn’t take long to discover when something went wrong with
the latest patch.
In these instances, community team members will normally either combine
threads
(which gets messy) or select one main thread, let the players know X
bug is
being worked on, and close all the others. It’s not a matter
of censorship or
that they hate you, it’s because they’re trying to
keep things organized so
people coming to the forums can see what’s going on. In the
case of old bugs,
again, the team is well aware.

Despite
what some people think, posting a message of “We
know it’s broken and will implement a fix as soon as we
can” gets old to
players, quickly - especially when that bug persists for months on end.
Like it
or not, all bugs are prioritized and quite often repeatedly get pushed
to the
next patch because more impactful bugs have been discovered.
Eventually, they
may even be deemed minor enough to be listed as “Not going to
fix” because of
the cost versus return investment isn’t worth it. I know that
to you
it’s a big deal that sometimes when
you fire your Bow of Awesomeness within 5 feet of a cavern wall inside
the
Dungeon of Doom and it heals an enemy instead of doing its appropriate
damage.
Sadly though, that bug may only affect less than 0.0001% of the
game’s population
and the cost to fix it just isn’t worth it. I know it sucks,
but it’s the
truth.

In
terms of players posting about something they’d like
to see in game, the ones that gather enough interest from the community
team,
individual developers that periodically scan the forums (though rare,
they do
exist), or from other players, are sent on to the appropriate
development team.
When it comes to something cool being added into a game, developers
cannot wait
to tell everyone about it. I’ve seen developers get something
into a workable
state and are salivating at the mouth so much in anticipation of
letting
players know about it that they nearly drown. Once again though,
they’re not
allowed to and for a good reason.

Let’s
say a developer made the following statement in a
forum post - “The team is working on this awesome new feature
called Bazoola
Woogle Hunting. The design discussions are going great so far, but
it’s still
on the drawing board. I can’t promise anything will come of
it, but hopefully
we’ll be able to show the community more about it
soon.” There are so many
reasons the community team on hand would cringe at this that
they’re hard to
process, but let me point out a few.

class="MsoNoSpacing">

alt="" src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/252912">

style="font-weight: bold;">Rule number one
– I know “soon” to the player base means
a couple weeks, but in development speak, that can
style="">easily
be six months or more. Remember, these people may have been
working on this project for years. To them, six months is nothing.

style="font-weight: bold;">Rule number two
– “I can’t promise anything”
gets
translated to “I promise it will be in the game
soon” within a matter of
minutes on various boards the statement gets forwarded to.

style="font-weight: bold;">Rule number three
– Rules one and two are the creators of
“The Company Lied To Us!" syndrome.

I
realize this article may seem a little harsh, but these
are some of the realities of communicating with developers and game
companies
in general. Does that mean there aren’t ways to improve
communication?
Absolutely not. It does mean that a utopia of players always being
aware of
everything a company is working on will never come to pass though.